Tag: Aviation

STATEMENT OF CHESLEY B. “SULLY” SULLENBERGER III

Subcommittee on Aviation
of the
The United States House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure

June 19, 2019

Thank you, Chairman Larsen, Ranking Member Graves, Chairman DeFazio, Ranking Member Graves, and other members of the committee. It is my honor to appear today before the Subcommittee on Aviation.

We are here because of the tragic crashes within five months of Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian 302, two fatal accidents with no survivors on a new aircraft type, something that is unprecedented in modern aviation history.

Like most Americans and many others around the world I’m shocked and saddened by these two awful tragedies and the terrible loss of life. Now we have an obligation to find out why these tragic crashes happened, and keep them from ever happening again.

These crashes are demonstrable evidence that our current system of aircraft design and certification has failed us.

We don’t yet know in every way how it has failed us. Multiple investigations are ongoing. We owe it to everyone who flies to find out where and how the failures occurred, and what changes must be made to prevent them from happening in the future.

It is obvious that grave errors were made that have had grave consequences, claiming 346 lives.

The accident investigations of these crashes will not be completed for many months, but some things are already clear.

Accidents are the end result of a causal chain of events, and in the case of the Boeing 737 MAX, the chain began with decisions that had been made years before, to update a half-century-old design.

Late in the flight testing of the 737 MAX, Boeing discovered an aircraft handling issue. Because the 737 MAX engines were larger than the engines on previous 737 models they had to be mounted higher and farther forward for ground clearance, which reduced the aircraft’s natural aerodynamic stability in certain conditions. Boeing decided to address the handling issue by adding a software feature, Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), to the 737 MAX. MCAS was made autonomous, able in certain conditions to move a secondary flight control by itself to push the nose down without pilot input.

In adding MCAS, Boeing added a computer-controlled feature to a human-controlled airplane but without also adding to it the integrity, reliability and redundancy that a computer-controlled system requires.

Boeing also designed MCAS to look at data from only one Angle of Attack (AOA) sensor, not two. One result of this decision was that it allowed false data from a single sensor to wrongly trigger the activation of MCAS, thus creating a single point of failure. A single point of failure in an aircraft goes against widely held aircraft design principles.

On both accident flights, the triggering event was a failure of an AOA sensor. We do not yet know why the AOA sensors on these flights generated erroneous information, triggering MCAS, whether they were damaged, sheared off after being struck, were improperly maintained or repaired, or for some other reason.

Boeing designers also gave MCAS too much authority, meaning that they allowed it to autonomously move the horizontal stabilizer to the full nose-down limit.

And MCAS was allowed to move the stabilizer in large increments, rapidly and repeatedly until the limit was reached. Because it moved stabilizer trim intermittently, it was more difficult to recognize it as a runaway trim situation (an uncommanded and uncontrolled trim movement emergency), as appears to have happened in the first crash.

Though MCAS was intended to enhance aircraft handling, it had the potential to have the opposite effect; being able to move the stabilizer to its limit could allow the stabilizer to overpower the pilots’ ability to raise the nose and stop a dive toward the ground. Thus it was a trap that was set inadvertently during the aircraft design phase that would turn out to have deadly consequences.

Obviously Boeing did not intend for this to happen. But to make matters worse, even the existence of MCAS, much less its operation, was not communicated to the pilots who were responsible for safely operating the aircraft until after the first crash.

Also with the MAX, Boeing changed the way pilots can stop stabilizer trim from running when it shouldn’t. In every previous version of the 737, pilots could simply move the control wheel to stop the trim from moving, but in the MAX, with MCAS activated, that method of stopping trim no longer worked. The logic was that if MCAS activated, it had to be because it was needed, and pulling back on the control wheel shouldn’t stop it.

It is clear that the original version of MCAS was fatally flawed and should never have been approved.

It has been suggested that even if the MCAS software had flaws, the pilots on these flights should have performed better and been able to solve the sudden unanticipated crises they faced. Boeing has even said that in designing MCAS they did not categorize a failure of MCAS as critical because they assumed that pilot action would be the ultimate safeguard.

We owe it to everyone who flies, passengers and crews alike, to do much better than to design aircraft with inherent flaws that we intend pilots will have to compensate for and overcome.

Pilots must be able to handle an unexpected emergency and still keep their passengers and crew safe, but we should first design aircraft for them to fly that do not have inadvertent traps set for them.

We must also consider the human factors of these accidents.

From my 52 years of flying experience, and my many decades of safety work – I know that nothing happens in a vacuum, and we must find out how design issues, training, policies, procedures, safety culture, pilot experience and other factors affected the pilots’ ability to handle these sudden emergencies, especially in this global aviation industry.

Dr. Nancy Leveson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a quote that succinctly encapsulates much of what I have learned over many years: “Human error is a symptom of a system that needs to be redesigned.”

These two recent crashes happened in foreign countries, but if we do not address all the important issues and factors, they can and will happen here. To suggest otherwise is not only wrong, it’s hubris.

As one of our preeminent human factors scientists, Dr. Key Dismukes, now retired as Chief Scientist for Human Factors at the NASA Ames Research Center, has said, “Human performance is variable and it is situation-dependent.”

I’m one of the relatively small group of people who have experienced such a sudden crisis – and lived to share what we learned about it. I can tell you firsthand that the startle factor is real and it is huge – it interferes with one’s ability to quickly analyze the crisis and take effective action.

Within seconds, these crews would have been fighting for their lives in the fight of their lives.

These two accidents, as well as Air France 447 which crashed in the South Atlantic in June 2009, are also vivid illustrations of the growing level of interconnectedness of devices in aircraft. Previously, with older aircraft designs, there were mostly stand-alone devices, in which a fault or failure was limited to a single device that could quickly be determined to be faulty and the fault remain isolated. But with integrated cockpits and data being shared and used by many devices, a single fault or failure can now have rapidly cascading effects through multiple systems, causing multiple cockpit alarms, cautions and warnings, which can cause distraction and increase workload, creating a situation that can quickly become ambiguous, confusing and overwhelming, making it much harder to analyze and solve the problem.

In both 737 MAX accidents, the failure of an AOA sensor quickly caused multiple instrument indication anomalies and cockpit warnings. And because in this airplane type the AOA sensors provide information to airspeed and altitude displays, the failure triggered false warnings simultaneously of speed being too low and also of speed being too fast. The too slow warning was a ‘stick-shaker’ rapidly and loudly shaking the pilot’s control wheel. The too fast warning was a ‘clacker’, another loud repetitive noise signaling overspeed. These sudden loud false warnings would have created major distractions and would have made it even harder to quickly analyze the situation and take effective corrective action.

I recently experienced all these warnings in a 737 MAX flight simulator during recreations of the accident flights. Even knowing what was going to happen, I could see how crews could have run out of time and altitude before they could have solved the problems.

Prior to these accidents, I doubt if any U.S. airline pilots were confronted with this scenario in simulator training.

We must make sure that everyone who occupies a pilot seat is fully armed with the information, knowledge, training, skill, experience and judgment they need to be able to be the absolute master of the aircraft and all its component systems, and of the situation, simultaneously and continuously throughout a flight.

As aviation has become safer, it has become harder to avoid complacency. We have made air travel so safe and routine, some have assumed that because we haven’t had a lot of accidents in recent years we must be doing everything right.

But we can no longer define safety solely as the absence of accidents. We must do much more than that; we must be much more proactive than that.

We need to proactively find flaws and risks and mitigate them before they lead to harm.

We must investigate accidents before they happen.

Each aircraft manufacturer must have a comprehensive safety risk assessment system that can review an entire aircraft design holistically, looking for risks, not only singly, but in combination.

We must also look at the human factors and assumptions made about human performance in aircraft design and certification, and pilot procedure design.

In addition to fixing MCAS in a way that resolves all the many issues with it, including that the AOA Disagree light be made operative on all Max aircraft, we must greatly improve the procedures to deal with uncommanded trim movement, provide detailed system information to pilots that is more complete, give pilots who fly the 737 MAX additional Level D full flight simulator training so that they will see, hear, feel, experience and understand the challenges associated with MCAS, such as Unreliable Airspeed, AOA Disagree, Runaway Stabilizer and Manual Trim. They must have the training opportunity to understand how higher airspeeds greatly increase the airloads on the stabilizer, making it much more difficult to move manually, often requiring a pilot to use two hands, or even the efforts of both pilots to move it. And in some cases, how it cannot be moved at all unless the pilot flying temporarily stops trying to raise the nose and relieves some of the airloads by moving the control wheel forward.

Pilots must develop the muscle memory to be able to quickly and effectively respond to a sudden emergency. Reading about it on an iPad is not even close to sufficient; pilots must experience it physically, firsthand.

We should all want pilots to experience these challenging situations for the first time in a simulator, not in flight with passengers and crew on board.

We must look closely at the certification process. There have been concerns about the aircraft certification process for decades. Just a brief search revealed 18 reports produced by GAO, DOT OIG, and Congressional committees since 1992.

Many questions remain to be and must be answered:

Has the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) outsourced too much certification work?

Should FAA be selecting the manufacturer employees who do certification work on behalf of FAA, instead of the employer, as is currently the case?

Did oversight fail to result in accountability?

Do the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees and Boeing employees doing certification work have the independence they need to ensure safe designs?

Was there a failure to identify risks and their implications?

Was the analysis of failure modes and effects inadequate?

How was it that critically important information was not effectively communicated and shared with airlines and pilots?

Many other questions must be asked about the role Boeing played in these accidents:

Was there a leadership failure?
A governance failure?
An engineering failure?
A risk analysis failure?
A safety culture failure?

Whistle-blower protection must be strong and effective, and if it is not strong enough, we must strengthen it.

Key leaders and members of each safety-critical aviation organization must have subject matter expertise; in other words, they must be pilots who understand the science of safety. There should be at least one person so qualified on each corporate board of directors of each aviation company. Top project engineers of aircraft manufacturers must also be pilots.

Airlines worldwide must adhere to the highest standards of aircraft maintenance and crew training.

All the layers of safety must be in place. They are the safety net that helps keep air travelers and crews from harm.

Only by investigating, discovering, and correcting the ways in which our design, certification, training and other systems have failed us and led to these tragedies can we begin to regain the trust of our passengers, flight attendants, pilots and the American people. And, of course, in order for passengers to trust that the 737 MAX is safe to fly, pilots will have to trust that it is.

We have a moral obligation to do this.

If we don’t – if we just file the findings away on a shelf to gather dust, we will compound these tragedies. What would make the loss of lives in these accidents ever more tragic is if we say these were black swan events, unlikely to happen again, and decide not act on what we learn from them. To protect the status quo.

The best way to honor the lives tragically lost is to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

STATEMENT OF CHESLEY B. “SULLY” SULLENBERGER III

 

Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security
of the
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

April 28, 2015

Thank you, Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Nelson, Chair Ayotte, Ranking Member Cantwell, and other members of the committee. It is my great honor to appear today before the Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security. 

I have dedicated my entire adult life to aviation safety. I have served as a pilot for more than 40 years, logging more than 20,000 hours of flight experience. In fact, just last month marked the 48^th anniversary of my first flying lesson. I have served as an airline check airman (flight instructor) and accident investigator, and continue to serve as an aviation safety expert.

And on January 15, 2009, I was the Captain on US Airways Flight 1549, which has been called the “Miracle on the Hudson.” On that flight, multiple bird strikes caused both engines to fail and, in concert with my crew, including of course our First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, I conducted an emergency landing on the Hudson River saving the lives of all 155 people aboard. And Jeff is with us today in the hearing room. Jeff, I could not have had a better colleague that day or since. 

I saw the birds just 100 seconds after takeoff, about two seconds before we hit them. We were traveling at 316 feet per second, and there was not enough time or distance to maneuver a jet airliner away from them. When they struck and damaged both engines, we had just 208 seconds to do something we had never trained for, and get it right the first time.

The fact that we landed a commercial airliner on the Hudson River with no engines and no fatalities was not a miracle, however. It was the result of teamwork, skill, in-depth knowledge, and the kind of judgment that comes only from experience.

As a result of all of this, I deeply understand what is at stake in questions of aviation safety; and I am uniquely qualified to talk about what works, what doesn’t, and why it is so important that we get these rules right. The traveling public, whose lives we literally hold in our hands, deserves and expects nothing less. 

I appear before you today knowing that the airline industry has their lobbyists and trade associations, but the traveling public does not. I consider it my professional responsibility and my personal duty to be an advocate for the safety of all air travelers. And as you consider the FAA Reauthorization Bill, I want to say it is critical that you maintain the requirement that newly hired commercial pilots—at both major and regional airlines—have an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate and a minimum of 1,500 hours of flight experience, as Congress has mandated in Public Law. Public safety absolutely demands it. 

There are some who seek to roll back this requirement. They want to weaken it by allowing more credits for some non-flying activities or hours spent in flight school simulation to be counted as a substitute for real-world experience. They also claim that this safety standard is causing a pilot shortage among regional carriers and restricting flights to smaller cities. 

They could not be more wrong. There are no shortcuts to experience. There is no shortcut to safety. The standards are the standards because they are necessary. 

There are some in the industry who look upon safety improvements as a burden and a cost when they should be looking at them as the only way to keep their promise to do the very best they can to keep their passengers safe. 

As airline professionals, aviation regulators, and legislators, we must have the integrity and courage to reject the merely expedient and the barely adequate as not good enough. We must not allow profit motives to undermine our clear obligation to do what is right to ensure public safety. And I assure you that public safety demands that every newly hired pilot have a minimum of 1,500 hours of flying experience before they are entrusted with protecting the lives of the traveling public.  

I have seen first-hand the real costs—the human costs—of having inadequate levels of safety. These are costs that no family should ever have to bear. And no one knows this better than the families here with us today. These are some of the families of the victims of Continental Connection/Colgan Air Flight 3407, a regional flight from Newark, NJ, which crashed on approach to Buffalo, NY, on February 12, 2009, killing all 49 people onboard and one person on the ground. 

It was a terrible tragedy that resulted from the performance of the crew and safety deficiencies. But even more concerning, the federal investigation into this crash revealed that these safety deficiencies reflected a systemic problem among some regional carriers that lacked the robust safety systems of major airlines.

This investigation confirmed what many of us know: that we have a two-class system in the airline industry. Major airlines reflect the gold-standard in best practices, training, and safety management programs while some regional airlines, in a race to the bottom that they seem to be winning, take shortcuts to save money wherever they can, often potentially negatively impacting safety. 

Early this year, my wife, Lorrie, and I visited the site of the crash in Buffalo and met with the families of the victims, many of whom—in the wake of these findings, went to Capitol Hill, to advocate for improved safety measures. Knocking on doors at major federal agencies and meeting with hundreds of people, including President Obama, their goal was to strengthen safety rules on behalf of all members of the traveling public because they didn’t want anyone else to ever again pay the terrible price they did for lapses in regional airline safety. Against insurmountable odds, they succeeded—inspiring an overwhelming number of the 111^th Congress to pass the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010. Every member of the flying public owes them a debt of gratitude. We also owe you, the members of Congress, our thanks for getting this right.

One of the most important elements of this Act was the establishment of the 1,500-hour standard for airline pilots. Yet just two years since this safety standard went into effect, airline lobbyists are trying to weaken the provision because they consider it a burden or cost.

With the immediacy of that 2009 tragedy having passed, they also are appealing to new members of Congress and staffers who may not remember the Buffalo crash. Putting self-interest over public safety, they are trying to gain your support in rolling back the essential progress that has been made for airline safety. 

Some lobbyists would like you to significantly roll back the 1,500-hour minimum. Short of that, they want the FAA to allow simulator and academic training hours to count toward meeting the 1,500-hour minimum. They see this as an easier, more convenient, less expensive path to getting young pilots into regional airline cockpits.

But there are no shortcuts to experience. There is no shortcut to safety. The standards are the standards because they are necessary.  

Throughout the entire 112-year history of powered flight, one thing has been true.  The most important safety device in any airliner is a well-trained, experienced pilot. That is even more true today, especially as we transition from my generation of pilots to the next.  We must make sure that each generation of pilots has the same well learned, deeply internalized fundamental flying skills, the in-depth knowledge, experience, and judgment. And that is why pilot preparation, qualifications, screening, training—and experience—are so important. 

On behalf of traveling Americans, I want to thank you for the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010. You got it right, and I urge you and all members of this committee to continue to uphold these essential safety standards now and reject the claims of those who would urge you to put profits over the safety of the American people. We must all behave as if the victims of the Continental Connection/Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash are watching and judging our integrity and courage this very moment—as their families are.

I now want to more specifically address the arguments that some have made for undercutting these essential safety regulations—and why each one is wrong, dead wrong.

First, lobbyists are seeking to roll back the experience requirement that Congress wisely mandated in 2010 to protect the safety of the traveling public. This is preposterous.

Let me tell you why we cannot have pilots with less than the required experience flying passengers. Pilots with less than the required experience may only have seen one cycle of the seasons of the year as a pilot —one season of thunderstorms, one winter of ice and snow. He or she may never have had a plane de-iced before, may never have landed with a gusty crosswind exceeding 30 knots, and may never have had to land on a rainy night when the glare off a wet surface makes it difficult to tell exactly where you are. And if they received all their flight training in a warm dry climate, they may never even have flown in a cloud before! I would not want my family members in a plane operated by someone with as little experience as that, and I don’t think you would either. 

Some of these lobbyists go on to say there is nothing magical about the 1,500-hour standard because, to earn the hours, pilots waste their time, merely drag banners by the beach. This is a catchy sound bite but it is a big lie. In the whole country, perhaps a few hundred pilots fly banners; it is a miniscule percentage of the commercial aviation industry. There are, and always have been, good and valuable pathways to develop the experience required to fly a commercial airliner under a variety of conditions, such as flight instruction, charter and cargo operation, and corporate flying.

Those who argue to reduce the flight hours required of newly hired pilots also imply that First Officers do not need to have the same level of competence as the Captain. But it has been 80 years since the airline industry has had apprentices in the right seat of airliners. For all that time, we have had qualified pilots in both seats, and we absolutely must continue to do so. The safety systems that the industry has developed and implemented over the last twenty years are based on the assumption of two fully trained, capable and experienced pilots in the cockpit, with each pilot able to be the absolute master of the aircraft in every possible situation at every moment. The value of these practices cannot be questioned. The last fatal accident of a U. S. carrier fully adopting these practices was in November 2001. We have had fourteen years of perfect safety from major carriers employing two fully trained and most importantly, experienced, pilots. The intent of the 2010 safety language was to raise the level of safety in the regional airline industry by requiring the adoption of proven safety systems. Raising the basic requirement for pilot experience was central to this effort.  

I can tell you that US Airways Flight 1549 would have had a very different ending had my First Officer Jeff Skiles been a less experienced pilot. Like me, Jeff had more than 20,000 hours of flying experience when we lost the engines on that flight. His extensive experience is what enabled him to intuitively know what he needed to do in that emergency, when the work load and time pressure were so extreme that we did not have time to talk about what had just happened and what we needed to do about it, or for me to direct his every action. If he were a relatively inexperienced pilot, we could not have had the same outcome and people likely would have died. Experience is what made the difference between death for some and life for all. 

Recent events have also made tragically clear why it is so important that newly hired pilots have a minimum of 1,500 hours of flying experience. The First Officer on the Germanwings flight that crashed in the Alps last month had only about 600 hours of flying time. Under existing standards, he would not have qualified as an Air Carrier pilot in the United States and would not have been in a position to accomplish his dark and heinous act. By requiring more experience there is an opportunity to evaluate a prospective candidate over time and in many cases among several employers. 

The point is this: Any reduction in today’s standard reduces the time a pilot can be observed as a competent, reliable, and trustworthy person before being entrusted with the controls of a commercial airliner full of passengers. With a 1,500-hour standard, employers are able to know more about new pilots, able to have more people screening and observing them over a longer period of time, and able to make a more informed decision about whether they have proven themselves worthy of the public’s trust. 

When I served as a check airman (an instructor responsible for evaluating pilots) sometimes their performance would be just at the threshold of acceptable. In those cases, I would ask myself this question: When he or she is in the 14^th hour of his or her duty day, flying at night in bad weather into an airport he or she has never seen before, would I want my family on that airplane? If the answer was yes, then he or she met the standard. If the answer was no, he or she did not. Those are the kinds of judgments that can only be made when there is adequate time to observe someone in an operational environment. And that is the kind of judgment that Congress made in mandating the ATP with 1500 hours.

A second tactic lobbyists are using to try to weaken the standard is by suggesting that more non-flying training count toward the 1,500 hours in place of actual flying experience. Here’s what’s wrong with this line of thinking: Training experiences are highly scripted, highly supervised, and sterile environments where you know what is coming. Real world experiences are not. They are messy and ambiguous and you don’t have anyone holding your hand every step of the way. To propose that training situations are a substitute for real world experience is like saying that studying driving in a classroom is the same as having driven on a busy highway in inclement weather. There is just no substitute for real world experience.

Third, lobbyists who want to weaken today’s safety standards say that they are creating a pilot shortage because regional carriers cannot find enough qualified applicants. They also say that the 1,500-hour requirement is threatening air service to small communities and imposing an economic hardship. The implication is that you should reduce the safety requirement so that they can hire less qualified applicants. 

This flies in the face of logic. Would we allow some airlines to buy jet fuel that is below specification because it was too inconvenient or costly to buy jet fuel that fully met all the critical safety standards? Would we allow some airlines to underinsure because they didn’t want to pay so much for insurance? If there were not enough doctors to serve rural areas, would we advocate a two-year medical degree? Why would we ever allow less qualified pilots to serve small communities? Are the lives of those from rural areas worth less than passengers in large cities?

People traveling to small communities deserve to be no less safe than people traveling to large cities. They must not be forced to entrust their lives to less experienced pilots, or airlines that make smaller investments in training or safety management programs than those serving metropolitan areas.

What is really going on is this: There is not a pilot shortage, but there is a shortage of pilots willing to enter, or continue employment in, the airline industry under the current economic model. The standard for entry to the airline cockpit is rightly a high bar and requires significant personal and financial investment to achieve the standards necessary to serve and protect the safety of the traveling public. Currently the rewards of an airline career don’t match the investment required. This in turn makes other careers—in and outside of aviation—more attractive, exacerbating airline pilot recruitment. 

Worse yet, this untenable economic model turns away the best and brightest at the door when they are first considering a career in aviation. Like doctors, pilots make a significant financial investment in their education and training, in some cases upwards of $200,000; and like doctors, they should see a career path worthy of that investment. 

Doctors, however, only hold one life in their hands at any given moment. As the tragedy of the Germanwings accident shows, pilots hold the responsibility for many more. Passengers entrust their lives to pilots. Why would they not expect the same training and professional experience from their pilot as they would from their surgeon? The First Officer of the ill-fated Continental Connection/Colgan Air Flight 3407 earned $16,400 a year before taxes, clearly an unbelievably low salary for someone who literally holds the lives of their passengers in their hands. 

Traditionally an airline career has attracted applicants with experience well in excess of even today’s minimum required hours. In fact, pilots applying for a job with a commercial airline would typically have had several thousand hours of flight experience. Only recently have some regional carriers lowered their experience requirements to meet the dictates of an unsustainable economic model. As Gordon Bethune, former CEO of Continental Airlines said, “You can make a pizza so cheap, nobody will eat it. You can make an airline so cheap, nobody will fly it.”

Since the regional airline industry has insisted on trying to use this broken economic model, they have created their own problems. We must not lower the required standards to enable them to continue to do so. 

It is not in anyone’s best interest—not regional airlines, not major airlines, and certainly not the traveling public—to have the aviation industry lower commonsense safety requirements to meet an unsupportable business model. 

Regional carriers often compete on the basis of cost to be the affiliate of major airlines. Let me tell you what that means to you as a passenger: It means you are flying on the lowest bidder. Would you want your surgeon to be the lowest bidder? But there is no shortcut to safety. That is what FAA minimums have been designed to ensure. And since many operators have lowered their standards to the FAA minimum, we must make sure that those minimum standards are genuinely adequate to protect our passengers. 

Quality vs. quantity is a false dichotomy. When it comes to airline safety, we need not and must not choose between quality and quantity, because we can and must have both. There are existing methods for pilots to get the requisite experience. There always have been. And since the 1,500-hour standard has been put in effect, flight schools, regional airlines and major airlines have been working together to create a true career path that benefits the industry and most importantly, the traveling public. This is being accomplished by creating partnerships between aviation training academies and regional carriers such as the career program at the aptly named ATP Flight School where a beginning pilot is interviewed and provisionally hired by a regional carrier early in their career. Once an airline makes an offer of employment the pilot continues on at the flight school as a flight instructor building time and experience while training the next generation of pilots to enter the field. The regional carrier even contributes financially to the pilot’s education, and most importantly, the prospective airline pilot can be observed, evaluated, and nurtured while they attain the required flight time necessary for a restricted ATP. 

The second piece of the pathway is Flow Through agreements between regional carriers and major airlines allowing pilots from the regional to matriculate upwards to a major airline cockpit. Today a person considering a career in aviation can see a defined path forward worthy of the necessary personal and financial investment. 

The industry has created these healthy pathways—not in spite of the 1,500-hour standard–but because of it. It allows airlines the time to make good judgments regarding the skills and temperament of a pilot that are good for both pilots’ career and for the safety of the traveling public.

Finally, as aviation has become safer, some people seem to think that being a pilot has become an easier job, requiring less skill, knowledge, training, experience, and judgment. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

In spite of how commonplace air travel is today, we must never forget that what we are actually doing is pushing a tube filled with people through the upper atmosphere, seven or eight miles above the earth, traveling at 80% of the speed of sound, in a hostile environment with outside air pressure one-quarter that on the ground, and outside temperatures to 70 degrees below zero; and we must return it safely to the surface every time. 

Professional pilots make it look easy but it’s not. It’s hard. If it were easy, anyone, everyone could do it. And that is just not the case. It takes deeply internalized well-learned fundamental skills, in-depth knowledge, and the kind of judgment that comes only from experience. 

When pilots enter this noble profession that I consider a calling, they make a tacit promise to all their future passengers that they will keep them safe. And every airline executive, every aviation regulator, every legislator who oversees aviation should feel the same obligation and keep that same promise. 

Honoring that promise requires us to acknowledge that there are no shortcuts to experience. There is no shortcut to safety. The standards are the standards because they are necessary. And, the traveling public deserves and expects one level of safety: not one level for major airlines, and another for regional airlines. 

I urge you to stand with me in showing the right judgment by upholding the 1,500-hour standard for the safety of all Americans.

Thank you.